We’ve settled ourselves nicely into our new residence. The pool is fine; I know because I’ve tested it. We still have not located a wifi cafe closer than 10 minutes walk away. Yesterday morning I popped into one just down the road and asked if they have wifi. A blank look was the response. So I tried again, “wifi, internet?” Another blank look and then, “Ni sé lo que es.” In other words, “I don’t even know what it is.” I guess we’ll just keep getting exercise on the way to check our email.
And suddenly we find ourselves with just a week left before we fly back to England. No doubt this week will rush past. Time has a curious way of accelerating as you come to the end of a holiday. We have various things we still want to do and people we still want to see before we head back to the UK.
One of the things we have achieved this week is a visit to the Islas Cíes. The islands out in the Atlantic are always magical but when we set off on Monday it was in thick mist, practically fog, making it seem even more mysterious. You could see very little of the estuary as we sailed out. But after lunch it had almost all cleared and we made it up to the lighthouse and back. 
There were a few more signs in English. And we discovered some interesting rock formations.
The journey home in the early evening was in bright sunshine. By the time we return to Vigo the islands will be closed to visitors once more.
Meanwhile I have been continuing to read interesting bits and pieces. In one newspaper I have discovered that the interestingly named “musealisation” of the Roman and pre-Roman settlement up at the Castro has had a fall in visitor numbers, especially over the summer months. The article put this down to “la reducción de horarios”. Well, if you reduce the hours that a place is open, you might expect the numbers of visitors to fall! It seems like logic to me. However, the library follows the same illogic. In the summer, when people might have more leisure to go and choose books, the library is only open in the mornings. That’s joined-up thinking for you.
In one of my recent (morning) visits to the library I picked up at random a book by Antonio Muñoz Molina, in which he has collected together articles he has written about the craft of writing. I had never read anything by this writer but the book looked interesting as I skimmed it in the library and it proved indeed to be so. One of his pieces was his acceptance speech on becoming a member of the Real Academia, a very august literary and cultural association. All acceptance speeches are bound and published.
Muñoz Molina’s speech dealt largely with another writer, Max Aub, who was never invited to join the Real Academia, because he fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, on one of the last boats carrying refugees from Barcelona as that city fell to Franco’s forces in 1939. In 1956 Max Aub published what might have been his acceptance speech in an alternative reality, one in which he would have continued as a theatre director and become a big wheel in Spanish theatre.
His speech to what Muñoz Molina refers to as the “Irreal Academia” was bound and published just like all the other speeches except that the coat of arms on the front cover was not exactly that of the Real Academia. Instead of having the Spanish royal crown it had the crown of the Second Republic, a small difference that not many people might notice.
And Max Aub’s unreal acceptance speech addresses figures who might also have been Real Academicians, had the Civil War never happened. In his audience were the poets García Lorca, NOT executed and buried somewhere outside Granada in the early days of the conflict, Miguel Hernández, who did NOT die in one of Franco’s prisons a couple of year’s after the Civil War ended, and Rafael Alberti, who did NOT go and live in exile until after Franco’s death.
Muñoz Molina commented that he felt that his own literary and cultural education was limited because of the absence of certain figures whose works were simply not taught, nor even mentioned, in schools. In his teens, when he discovered the poetry of García Lorca he had to ask for it specifically in the local library, where it was kept in a special section and, although he does not say so, it is quite likely that his name was added to a list of those who asked for that subversive verse. But that may not have worried him too much.
He already had anti-establishment leanings, being aware that his parents, children during the Civil War, had had their education, provided free by the Second Republic, cut short when Franco came into power. The children of Republicans did not need much education! They were not destined to get the best jobs anyway!
Apparently Max Aub’s books tended to mix fact and fiction, using real events as a basis for a novel. One of these is based on some hairdressers who formed themselves into a battalion in order to take part in the defence of the Casa del Campo during the siege of Madrid. They called themselves “Los Fígaros”.
I may not have time to seek out books by Max Aub and Muñoz Molina before I go back to England but I will have them on my list for my first visit to the library when we next visit Vigo.
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